Gear & Gadgets —

Hands on with Android M Developer Preview 1

We've scoured every screen of Android M to bring you this big list of differences.

The lockscreen time is thicker and the date has been switched to all-caps.

Get a load of this app drawer! The top row are the four most recent apps and drawer has been reduced to three rows to make room for big sorting letters. The app drawer also switched from horizontal pages to a vertical list, which is a big improvement.

If you don't have a lot of apps, the letters look even worse: they clump up on the side of the drawer. If you do have a lot of apps, the search function is nice.

The widget drawer is now organized by app, and it's also a vertical list now instead of horizontal pages. The paginated layout in Lollipop was very annoying, just look at the page indicator, which shows about a dozen pages of widgets.

Android 5.0 added priority notification controls to the volume keys, but M moved it to a panel in the quick settings. They've also been redesigned a bit.

A drop down was added to the freed up volume controls that lets you control the ringtone, media, and alarm volume.

In the developer options is a setting to enable "System UI tuner." It shows up at the end of the settings.

The System UI tuner only has one option right now: It lets you arrange the Quick Settings panels to what configuration you want.

There's even an option at the bottom to add a new panel. The only option is something called a "broadcast tile" which lets you type in a name but it doesn't seem to do anything. The System Ui Tuner also crashes a lot.

Selecting text looks a little different now. Cut/copy/paste has changed from indistinguishable icons to text buttons.

Sometimes there is even a crazy dropdown in the cut/copy/paste popup. Here the extra options are back, share, and select all.

Google settings are now an option directly in the settings, instead of being an icon in the app drawer.

There are two new options in Google Settings: "Set up nearby device," which opens the middle screen and seems to be for pairing Brillo things, and "Smart Lock Passwords," which syncs passwords from apps (for instance, Netflix) with your Google account.

Android M's back up system has been revamped. This seems like the second or third time Google has tried a backup system. We'll have to see if this one works once apps catch up.

The Apps page has lost its tab interface.

There's a new "advanced" section which houses all sorts of goodies.

"Default Apps" lets you set a default browser, dialer, and SMS app, while "assist" lets you plug an app into M's new Assist API, which is used by Google Now on Tap.

"App Links" lets apps claim links to certain websites, which stops Android's "Open With" menu from popping up. It's basically a way to say that you prefer an app over the browser for certain sites.

And of course, here you'll find the new app permissions options, which lets you selectively block apps from accessing certain parts of your phone.

This "ignore optimizations" screen is rather curious. We guess it has something to do with the new "Doze" feature?

App Notifications now have a big bar at the top that lets you filter by current setting.

Here's the filter options.

You can now block an app from doing a Heads-up notification (called "peek" here). This was a big user request.

No idea what this "inactive apps" screen does. When you set an app as "inactive," nothing seems to happen. The app still shows up in the app drawer and is perfectly usable.

Here are the new USB options, a USB type C device would have even more.

Apparently there is a new DHCP client in M.

"Bluetooth scanning" is a new feature, too. This would be something like Apple's Bluetooth Beacons.

There's a new Android Pay API, and here's the new "Tap & Pay" screen. It's obviously unfinished and needs some serious design work.

As we mentioned before, here's the new "theme" options, which only work on the settings.

For tablets, there's a split keyboard option.

Andrew Cunningham

And finally, here's the new Easter Egg.

SAN FRANCISCO—The Android M developer preview launched at Google I/O this year, and while it's clearly in a rough state and aimed at developers, we figured we should catalog whatever differences we could find between it and Android 5.0. The overall UI isn't much different from Lollipop, but Google has used M to tackle a lot of user requests.

The weirdest part of M is the new app drawer, which puts big index letters on the left side of the screen. It reduces the amount of space for icons, and generally looks ugly. We're not fans of the letters. The switch from horizontal pages back to vertical scrolling is a nice improvement, this makes it easy to fling your way to the bottom of a long app list, instead of having to swipe a thousand times. Vertical scrolling is on the widget drawer too, which would often grow to 10+ pages in Lollipop.

Lollipop's "Heads up notifications," which popped up over top of the screen, lacked user controls, but M allows users to set them on a per-app basis, which will make a lot of people happy. Before it was up to developers to decide if they were important or not, and of course, every developer though they were important. It's also now easy to control Android's three different volume sliders (Notifications, media, and alarms), thanks to a new drop down that shows them all at once.

We also ran into a few intriguing options that we can't use yet. There's setup for what looks like Brillo IoT devices, a mysterious "Inactive apps" screen that doesn't seem to do anything, and a new "Tap & Pay" screen that looks like the beginnings of Android Pay.

We also made a video:

Video by Jennifer Hahn and Andrew Cunningham.

Ron Amadeo
Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work. Emailron.amadeo@arstechnica.com//Twitter@RonAmadeo